


fool me

by cloudycats



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, nothing is good and no one is happy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2019-11-28 01:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18201923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudycats/pseuds/cloudycats
Summary: nightmares all the way down, folks.or: the player kills Gehrman without clearing the DLC, and Gehrman ends up where all hunters end up.  he handles this turn of events with Great Poise™.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey there! i have to recommend using Entire Work view if you're not already.

“It won't be for long,” Laurence said more than once in the months before they contacted Her.

There were arguments all the time, those days, Laurence with his Church and his healing and Gehrman with his Workshop and his hunting, the bloated shadow of the corpse they hadn't had the sense to leave alone threading silent tendrils through their words. The thought of seeing Laurence inspired near as much dread in Gehrman as the sight of another of his hunters lost to the beasts that loomed large and larger with every passing dawn. Gehrman still went, of course, when Laurence sent for him, but otherwise he avoided white robes like the plague. He remained in the Workshop night after night, tinkering with schematics and delegating the chance of crossing paths with Ludwig's band to his students.

The summoning was the one common ground they found. Laurence needed divine counsel, Gehrman the power to turn the tide. She offered both. _Anything they wanted_ , the Choir translators relayed – anything at all.

The price was hardly a price.

They still argued. It seemed impossible for them not to anymore. When they had to meet to discuss the progress in negotiations, Laurence sounded like a looping record, _this will solve a great deal_ and _it has to be done_ and _Yharnam can't last with us as we are_ , until Gehrman bit at him _who are you trying to convince_ and Laurence snapped back _can't you put up with me for one hour_ , fingers pressing into his eyes. He was getting headaches more often and growing less averse to placing the blame for them at Gehrman's feet.

 _It won't be for long_ was a phrase that cropped up as they neared the end. Laurence said, “I'll look for an alternative while you're gone. There must be one.”

“I'm trusting you,” Gehrman replied. That was the least threatening part of the arrangement, the time span. It wouldn't be forever. Whatever else Gehrman could and would say about Vicar Laurence, he would never deny that the man was brilliant. If another way existed – and it must, there could not be only one method to any result – then Laurence would find it.

She agreed to that term as well: when the hour came that Her help was no longer necessary, She would return what She took without conflict. So far as the Choir could tell, She was sincere. Though the gods can lie, they tend to be very bad at it; they don't understand humans well enough to know what information they can get away with twisting.

But years passed and the hunters who came through the dream stopped speaking of Laurence. _Vicar Amelia_ , they said in the same breath as _the Healing Church_ , and _Laurence? No, I don't. No one's seen him in years. The Church won't say._

And Gehrman and Laurence had not told anyone about Her outside of the few Choir masters they couldn't have contacted Her without.

That seems, in retrospect, something of an oversight.

They had reason for it. The Fishing Hamlet's long pall still loomed over them. The Hamlet had been a mistake. It had been, really, the worst mistake anyone would ever make, and the second worst mistake was the number of people Gehrman and Laurence dragged into the floodwaters with them. The agreement to keep things with Her quiet was an unspoken one, but it bound them both as tightly as a blood oath: neither could have borne a potential repeat.

(They still could not discover the fate of the child. Though Gehrman had dreams, sometimes, and when he woke from them there was salt on his tongue and rain on his face and a cry caught unvoiced in his throat.

He did not tell Laurence.)

Regret is paltry when set against the weight of so many years. Gehrman is nothing anymore but _tired_. He wants to sleep, he wants to cut off his hands so they will never make anything again, he wants a sky without moonlight and a darkness without memories.

What he gets is another nightmare.

\---

It's a bloodbath once he realizes what's happened. He rages. He curses and spits and howls. He descends from the abandoned Workshop in an onslaught of steel and silver and paves a road with bodies through the Cathedral Ward. In the haze, he doesn't notice that he recognizes most of them, or he notices and doesn't care.

The Grand Cathedral might have been carved brick by brick from his memories. His scythe drags on the stairs, clanging against stone with every step he takes between the statues of the watcher gods.

The air is clear and sharp and hollow in his lungs. Nostalgia gnaws at the orange-lit shadows, homesickness sours each breath he takes, and he does not know if they come from the stench of the town's blood or the weight of the nightmarish sky. More of his life has been spent under the bleeding moon's eye than under Yharnam's spires.

“ _Laurence_!” he shouts, voice cracking.

If he spared a thought to consider, he would come to the conclusion that Laurence has been buried for decades, that if he was not buried he would still be Gehrman's age and most likely retired, and that if he was not retired then he would still not be waiting here for Gehrman while there is a literal river of blood flowing through the Ward. But logic is not what brought him to the Cathedral.

It has been a long night, and the non-sense of dreams comes too easily to him. If Laurence is anywhere in this parody of Yharnam, then this is the place where Gehrman will find him. That's all.

Some part of him hopes, as the name rings in his ears, that he'll clear the stairs to an empty hall. Laurence should not be in a nightmare. If Gehrman had his way, no one would. But the rest of him wants in that moment nothing more than to see Laurence again. His hands are steady, and his eyes are clear, and his voice shakes. He has waited; and he has waited; and he has waited; and the wait is over and it is not Laurence's doing.

He should know better than this. Searching for answers was what landed them here. But he is old and tired and stupid (Laurence was always the brilliant one); he is beyond regret and beyond consequences.

If Laurence is dead, Gehrman would like to see the corpse. It has been such a long night. He should be allowed that much resolution, at least.


	2. gods. laurence,

"what did you do?"


	3. there are no answers here

Time passes, maybe.  The moon does not dim.  Shadows remain.  
  
(Gehrman couldn't name the moment in the dream when it happened.  It was a thought he never consciously touched.  But there arrived a point where he noticed that his fingers ached after he woke from sleep, that his knee burned when he forgot to favor it, that his doll stood taller than him and his bowing back; and he did not let himself think this is how it will end.  He doesn't think that, still.)


	4. Chapter 4

The nightmare is a litany of mistakes Gehrman never had the chance to make and others he never had the chance to stop. All he has left to him is the ability to clean up after the ruin.

To no one's surprise, he does that poorly.

He sinks to his knees beside Ludwig's head. Not out of respect or remorse or anything like that, he's just woozy from blood loss. It's been some time since he fought a beast. With his teeth and usable hand he ties the shredded rags of his sleeve around his shoulder.

“Gehrman?” Ludwig murmurs, eye rolling in its socket until it fixes on Gehrman's face.

“It's me, Ludwig.” The bandages are already dripping. Gehrman presses his hand to the wound until his wrinkled fingers are white under the blood. He rasps, “What should be done with the sword?”

Ludwig blinks, and some of the fog thins from his gaze. His distended pupil shines a little more clearly through the cataract. “He manages himself. Leave him be, or take him elsewhere. It shouldn't matter.” (Gehrman glances at the glowing, ten-foot relic lying in a pile of mangled not-quite-corpses and decides to opt for the former.) “Gehrman,” Ludwig mutters again, testing the word, searching for the familiarity that was once in it and which might be there still.

He snorts, and there's no trace of humanity in the sound. His voice, though – ah, but Gehrman can see, if he closes his eyes, a man speaking to him with that voice, warm and smiling and fair-haired under the sun. “Where were you?”

“Oh,” Gehrman sighs, “it's a long story.”

Ludwig does not press. Gehrman hopes it's not because Ludwig thinks he's already guessed some of the answer. Gehrman would rather Ludwig not think on it at all.

What occurred with Gehrman and with the dream and with Her was largely his own fault. It can't be compared to Yharnam's tragedy, to the stories of every human person caught in this nightmare ending and to the hurt of the good man in front of him who he still hasn't offered mercy to. Small and selfish thing that it is, his loss shouldn't be raised in the same breath as theirs. Ludwig should not feel the need to care about it.

“What happened when I was gone?” Gehrman asks.

“I don't know,” says Ludwig. His voice fades with his words, growing distant. “I don't know. The plague grew insistent. The beasts were larger. Stronger. They learned cunning. We required more blood each night. I worried our stock would run dry, but there was always more....”

Gehrman lets go of his shoulder to rub his thumb over Ludwig's cheek. The once-captain of the Church hunters closes his eye. “I wasn't any help to the Healing Church,” Ludwig says, “nor to the vicar.”

“No one can help Laurence when he isn't looking for it.”

“Have you seen him?” Ludwig asks.

Gehrman's expression does not change, but his hand stills.

Ludwig's eye meets his. “I have not, but I've heard he's here. Please – if you can, find him. This fate shouldn't be his.”

“All right,” Gehrman says, soft.

With the rush of the fight wearing off, pain sinks its claws in inch by inch. Gehrman'd rather forgotten the feeling of surviving a heavy injury. He doesn't much care about the possibility of losing the arm, knowing as he does that it will mend over whether he would like it to or not, but the knives stabbing into his left shoulder make it harder to put his thoughts in order. It takes a disproportionate amount of concentration simply to keep his thumb moving in a steady pattern.

Ludwig gasps for breath under his hand. Damp, long, snuffling inhalations. Gurgles when he sucks in the blood on the floor in place of air.

“Gehrman,” he manages. A plea. “If you've asked what you had to....” Gehrman's grip tightens involuntarily at the flare of anger that snares him, the desire to see broken everything that brought a proud man down to begging in his own and others' filth.

There is nothing Gehrman can lash out at. The scourge is not an enemy he can hurt any more than his self of the past is. He smooths away the anger with an effort – but some edges remain, still, and perhaps those are what lead Gehrman to turn the conversation away from what Ludwig wants. He tsks. “When did this happen to you? How long after I left?”

“You left when.... It was thirteen years after. No, it was fourteen.”

“Laurence?”

Ludwig's answer lodges behind Gehrman's ribs with a physical presence. “He was human when I fell.”

The Church hunter says, “I cannot tell you when that changed.”

And: “Forgive me.”

Two decades, thereabouts. Gehrman hopes it was longer than that, that Laurence held on to his sharp mind for as long as he could have, but – Laurence found nothing in that time, no alternative to Her. Not one.

Gehrman wondered, after he came to know Her well, how She could have agreed so readily to give him up once the terms expired –

It came down to hubris, did it not? Always that. They thought they'd learned something from their mistakes, and yet it hadn't seemed overconfidence to them to think that they could end the hunt in a lifetime. They'd destroyed so much in the short years after Byrgenwerth, broken the limits of humanity and gained an understanding of the world that they couldn't have imagined before. They'd brought miracles to Yharnam. What was the scourge against what they had found? The hunters had even conquered the Fishing Hamlet, the shining proof that it could be done, that the scourge was not unbreakable, that they had not lost all control over what they had sought the attention of.

Gods, but they'd thought the Hamlet a resolution at the time. What went on in that village happened once, and so they would not let it happen again, and that was the end of the matter, nearly a victory. A regrettable victory, a wretched and broken one, but they had salvaged lessons from the wreckage. Knowledge was greater than the minds that held it. Learning was what mattered, and they had found much of that in the Fishing Hamlet.

“Forgive you,” says Gehrman. He sounds cold to his own ears; bitter, biting ice. Steel and teeth, like the things he made in younger days. His hearing isn't what it was. “Whatever for, Ludwig?”

Ludwig doesn't respond. His eye is lidded. The blood on the floor hardly stirs when his breaths ghost across it.

Gehrman splays his hands over Ludwig's snout. The thick, bristle-haired beast-hide under his fingers, slick with blood and phlegm and sweat, burns feverishly hot. He can feel the shape of the teeth beneath it. “Shh, shh. Stay with me, old friend,” he says, and Ludwig startles back to focus with a gasp. “How much longer do you have?”

“Don't ask me that. Gehrman, please – ”

“I must sleep,” he says, cutting easily through Ludwig's words, “if this is to heal. Can you keep watch?”

“Damn it, Gehrman,” Ludwig rasps, lips peeling back from his gums.

Not a refusal.

Gehrman says, “The injury wouldn't exist if you hadn't put it there.”

Ludwig whickers. “That was not my fault,” he says with heat. That's an area Ludwig used to agree with him on, Gehrman remembers. A man is not to be judged for how he acts as a beast. He only didn't think Ludwig would apply his own words to himself.

“Then call it a favor,” Gehrman replies.

It's a moment before Ludwig speaks again. He sighs then, a long, wet, rattling exhalation. “Have you heard of honor duels?”

“The Cainhurst tradition?”

“It's tempting,” he murmurs.

Ludwig could only currently hurt a fly if the insect took the initiative to land on his tongue. They're both aware of as much. That's rather the point. “It won't be for long,” Gehrman says, trying for reassuring and taking a wrong turn into the neighboring province of exhausted instead. “A few hours.”

“And after....”

“Yes. Of course.”

\---

He carries Ludwig up to the drier grounds at the top of the stairs and falls asleep with his back against the paladin. His dreams are of rain.

The former beast's voice mixes with the crying child's for a bare, awful moment, and then sleep falls away. Ludwig says quietly, “Watch the entrance.”

Gehrman twists around to check on him first. He looks much the same as earlier, no worse and certainly no better. Gehrman rests a hand against his cheek. Then he moves away and pushes himself up with the scythe for support.

There is someone by the way he entered, stopped close enough to the exit to make an easy escape should things come to that. Caution is not a trait beasts are known for. This might not end in a death. “Well?” Gehrman calls.

The gaunt newcomer doesn't move. One of the Harrowed. Or an imitator, but he doesn't judge it likely. There are very few reasons one would steal the garments of a hunter dressed in rags. The Harrowed approaches once the last echoes fade, halting again after crossing half the space between them. Gehrman can't immediately identify the weapon on the hunter's back. “Did you defeat him?” he asks.

“I did.”

“You're the one who made all the corpses between here and the Cathedral Ward,” the Harrowed says.

It's not what the man means to imply, but Gehrman's face still creases at the thought that he might be known by only the deaths he's responsible for. He agrees, as it happens – how could he not, standing in the red nightmare of his legacy? – but the fact remains cutting. “You are....”

“I....” The Harrowed hesitates. “Simon is my name.”

Informative.

“You seek the end of the nightmare, do you not?” he quickly adds. “Then let me come with you. You owe me as much. You owe me _more_ than that.”

“Oh.... You know who I am?”

“The first of us, and nearly the last,” says Simon, and very suddenly Gehrman notices the tension he tries to conceal. It doesn't come from simple wariness. The man is _frightened_ , of a former hunter who lost his wheelchair somewhere in the ether. Stars above. What does he think Gehrman might do to him? “The only one of the old guard I couldn't find in this place no matter how I searched.” He swallows then, fingers clenching as he steels himself. He says, a little hoarsely, “You've joined the rest of us at last. Was it _time_ that finally caught up to you?”

“If time comes in the guise of multiple stab wounds,” Gehrman says casually, and pays attention to the blade-edged smile that briefly touches Simon's lips. No one in this room died well.

He folds up the scythe and returns it to the carrier on his back. He doesn't need a weapon now. “Yes, it was our mistakes that brought you here, I don't deny it.” He thinks of rain, and brine, and a mother's curse. Kos was not the one who first made the decision to haul innocents into the crossfire. “I won't stop you from coming if that's what you want.”

He returns to Ludwig, and the quiet splashes behind him tell him that Simon has taken the invitation to approach. Gehrman doesn't mind if the Harrowed listens on this conversation. The man's not likely to spread around what he hears, after all.

Ludwig, too, puts in only a perfunctory effort at lowering his voice. “Stab wounds?” he murmurs.

“A disagreement.”

“Over what?”

“They didn't say.” Ludwig squints at him. Gehrman caves a little, enough to add, “I pulled a blade on them.”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

He's tempted in that moment to explain the dream simply to delay by a little more what's coming, but he's put it off for too long already. Ludwig's patience won't hold. Gehrman only says mildly, “It's what happened,” before he hesitates. The quiet waxes between them. “Ludwig. You're certain.”

“This liminal state won't last.” The scourge doesn't play by half measures. Ludwig cannot be a man in a beast's body forever. The captain of hunters breathes in deeply, slowly, and with all the weight of desperation tells Gehrman, “I can't fall again. I _can't_.”

“No,” Gehrman agrees softly.

Ludwig holds his gaze. “I did you your favor.”

He nods.

It's not so different, in the end, from what She had him doing. He's crafted much in his life, weapons and armors and orders and dolls, and yet the kindest thing his wrinkled hands have ever been able to offer remains unchanging. Ludwig follows the blade as Gehrman draws it. He does not look away when Gehrman splays a steady hand against his skin, framing his eye between thumb and forefinger. "Take care of yourself," he says, and it is Gehrman then who cannot entirely hold back a flinch.

He does not look away when Gehrman brings the sword down. Siderite tears through his blotted pupil and sinks into his brain. His muscles slacken all at once.

When Gehrman slides the blade out, there is nothing left of Ludwig but the body that betrayed him.

\---

Gehrman gets to his feet. Simon, by the stair railing, makes a small aborted motion towards him, as if he was about to help Gehrman up before he remembered where and who they are.

“Let us continue,” Gehrman says. He doesn't quite recognize his own voice, but the Harrowed makes no comment on it as he follows.


End file.
